gardenman

I don't know the titles but in general I like: Unboxings Fish store tours Fish room tours Wholesaler tours Catching fish in the wild

It looks like a cuttlebone. They do float for a bit, but will eventually sink. I have a couple in my ten gallon tank to help out my snails in there. They floated for a day or two, then sank. If you had a rock or stone in the tank, you can weigh it down with that until it sinks on its own. (By the way, you can buy cuttlebone in the pet bird supplies part of pet stores for next to nothing.)

Should you move them to a different tank? If you've got a bigger tank lying around then absolutely yes. A comet and black moor will quickly outgrow a ten gallon tank. Goldfish like/need a big tank. I wouldn't worry too much about the eggs. Being a mix of a comet and a black moor, they'd have little real world value. Most fish stores would only accept them as feeder fish if they took them at all. If you've got a fish pond, or have always wanted a fish pond, now's a good time to start digging one if you want to keep the eggs. Could they be viable? Absolutely. Could you end up with a hundred mixed breed goldfish? Yep. Do you want a hundred mixed breed goldfish? Probably not. And even if you kept the hundred mixed breed goldfish they'd spawn in a year or so and you'd end up with thousands of mixed breed goldfish. In another year those new ones would also breed and you'd end up with tens of thousands of mixed breed goldfish. Before long you'd be able to fill the largest lakes and ponds with mixed breed goldfish.

To some extent where the tanks are relative to the room matters a lot also. Tanks closer to the floor tend to be cooler. Tanks closer to an outside wall tend to be cooler than tanks in the middle of the room. The warmest tanks tend to be those closest to the ceiling in the middle of the room. (Assuming you don't have fans blowing directly at them.) If you go to supplement heat in any of the tanks, it's typically best to toss in heaters on the bottom tanks as the heat that escapes will rise up to the tanks above helping to heat them, Having heat generating appliances (hot water heater, clothes dryer, home furnace, etc.) in the fish room can help to heat the fish room for you. If someone in your family regularly uses a toaster oven, air fryer, crock pot, etc. putting it in the fish room can also help to heat the fish room. (It may annoy the user having to go to the fish room to cook something, but the heat is good for the fish room and likely not needed in the kitchen.) If you have a home server for your family's computers, a fish room is a good placed to install it. (Not so much for the server as the humidity can be an issue, but the heat from the server can help to heat the fish room and a big server can generate a lot of heat.) Using the older incandescent light bulbs for room lighting can add extra heat to the room if your lighting fixtures can use them. Solar pool heaters (like the SunHeater Pool Heating System you can find at Amazon for $300) can be adapted to toss in some supplemental heat when needed if your fish room is near a south facing area.

Nearly any larger modern pond/fountain pump should be adequate. The Mag Drive family of pumps is very good. I've used them before with good success. Lately I've used the cheap Chinese made pumps (Kedsum). I've got a 400 gallon per hour one in my outdoor stock tank that I use to water my planters. It comes on and runs for twenty minutes a day from May through October with no hiccups at all. (It's on a smart plug.) I've found the Mag Drives wear out at the same rate as the cheap pumps, so I just buy the cheap ones these days. (What typically wears out are the end caps and rotors. Replacing those often costs as much as a new pump.) Most of the smaller capacity pumps you'll find these days use the magnetic drive and are sealed, so there's no oil to leak. If you're worried about oil leaking then you're probably familiar with the old Little Giant pumps from decades ago. That was more of an issue then when they used a shaft drive and the seal around the shaft could fail. Most modern water pumps use a magnetic drive and no oil at all so there's no oil to leak.

It's an interesting option. The most powerful Fluval 3.0 only uses 59 watts. The Kessil 500X uses 185 watts. To light a longish tank you'd need multiple Kessil lights. While more watts don't always mean more light, it's about the best comparison we have these days with LED lights. With a light bar you lose programmability, adjusting the spectrum, and more of the fancy stuff, but you get a whole lot of light for the money. And for me, I don't play with that stuff anyway. I just light the tanks. The lightbars give you both wide angle and spotlight lenses. In theory, the spotlight lenses should focus light deeper into the tank while the wide angle lenses give you overall lighting. It's something else to consider when looking for a powerful light. It would be interesting to know if you could disassemble a light bar and rearrange the lenses to better suit your needs. They typically cluster the spot light lenses in the middle of the bar and the flood light lenses outside. A more balanced arrangement might be better for an aquarium light.

The parents, the father anyway, typically won't bother the eggs and will guard them. They should be fine. Most of my bristlenose plecos are in a communal tank and my most reliable male will breed with more than one female and each new female when she takes over a cave will push out her rivals' eggs. I then remove those evicted eggs and raise them in a breeder box. Left exposed other plecos in the tank will munch on them. With just the pair in your tank you're not likely to have that issue. If all you have in the tank are shrimp, and smaller shrimp, the vast majority of the fry should survive just fine. Larger shrimp like amanos might hunt the fry, but smaller shrimp shouldn't cause any trouble. Plecos, even baby ones, are pretty tough little critters.

Have you considered an LED light bar like those made for off-road vehicles? You can get them up to 52" wide (possibly even wider) with impressive wattages (300 watts or more) and an insane amount of lumens (27,000 or more aren't uncommon) in a combination of spot and flood light configurations. You need a 12 volt power source for them, but that's pretty doable. Most are already weather-proof since they're made for vehicles. Amazon has a Yitamotor one that's 52" long, uses 300 watts, provides 27,000 lumen of a combined spot and flood light pattern and is 6,000 degrees kelvin for under $90. (You can find some at 6500 degrees kelvin also.) The spotlight lenses should give you decent penetration while the flood light lenses should give you better overall illumination. I've never tried one in a tank, but I've been tempted. They seem to offer the most bang for the buck in LED lighting these days. In terms of the amount of light given off for the dollar spent, a light bar is hard to beat.

I like getting gunk out of the water column completely, so something that used a filter fleece roll like the Aquamaxx AF-1 as a prefilter where the roll of fleece automatically advances as it fills with debris would be ideal. Most filters trap uneaten food, dead plant matter and fish waste, but keep it in the water column where it continues to decay. A moving fleece roll could get it out of the water completely. I made a prototype awhile back of such a prefilter that I'll post a photo of below. It worked okay but required me to advance the fleece (I used quilt batting) manually. This is kind of how the rotary drum filters for koi ponds work. A fine mesh screens out debris, when it becomes clogged the drum rotates and a spray bar washed the gunk into a gutter and out of the system. Making a rotary drum small enough for an aquarium would be a challenge, but a rolling fleece type design would be doable. An alternative to the rolling fleece type filter would simply be an old school top down type filter box like the old Super Kings or Aqua Kings by Supreme where you could peel off a top layer of filtration material as it became clogged. I used to stack filter material in those HOBs and then every couple of days peel off the uppermost layer. Every two weeks or so you'd get to the bottom layer and then when you pulled that out, you'd replace it with a fresh stack of filter material. (Once again, I used quilt batting.) With the physical gunk removed you now turn to bio and chemical filtration. What kind of biofiltration do you do? A drip type? Something like a miniature bakki shower? Submerged bio material? A fluidized K1 type filter? I'd probably go with the fluidized K1 type for biofiltration. Maybe a plant/anaerobic chamber that could be filled with a soil of some sort for growing pothos, or a similar plant with a very low flow of water through it. I'd just have a small section for chemical filtration. Modern activated carbon, the typical chemical filtration material, is so efficient you don't really need much.

I'm not anewbie, but there are some fairly big differences. When humans do water changes it's typically with treated water containing some form of chlorine/chloramine, fluoride, and other unnatural chemicals, and typically tries to match the pH and temperature of the water in the aquarium so we don't shock the fish. Rainfall is different. It's typically cooler than the pre-existing water, has nearly no mineral content, tends to be a bit acidic, and comes in varying volumes from minimal to flood inducing. Rainfall oxygenates the water by the act of falling into the water. It also tends to introduce an abundance of fresh food into the water supply by washing insects, fruits, and other food sources into the water. Even the heaviest of rainfall is less than a fifty percent water change we often carry out in our tanks. Doubling the volume of the Amazon would take a heck of a lot of rain. Water changes aren't bad, but they're not "natural" or simulate nature. They're a means to try and give our fish the best possible life experience in an unnatural setting. If you were to try and truly simulate nature, you'd have to use water more closely matching natural rainfall chemically, inject it in a rainfall like manner with rain droplets falling into the water, often for hours on end accompanied by the changes in light that comes with storms. The water added would be closely matching the temperature of rainfall in their native region. Food sources would be added during the process to simulate bugs and food washing into the natural water from a rainstorm. Any lack of minerals in the water would have to be compensated for by a mineral rich substrate. We often trick fish into spawning by doing large water changes with cooler water to simulate a heavy rainfall. Some then add extra food so the parent fish will think there's plenty of food for their fry. These are ways we try to trick the fish into spawning and for some fish it works. For many it doesn't. All fish spawn in the wild or they'd be extinct. Many fish don't spawn in captivity despite our best efforts to trick them into spawning. Why? Because we're not doing a good enough job of simulating nature. There's a spawning trigger of some sort that we haven't figured out just yet. Even at our best, we're a very poor imitation of nature.

When I buy plants I tend to divide them between my various tanks. I bought Pogostemon Octopus and received it back on January sixth. There were eight stems in the pot so I split it up between all four planted tanks The one stem in my 30 high is doing great. It's doubled in size (maybe more than doubled,) is putting out lots of new shoots and I couldn't ask for more from it. It's just perfect. Another stem in the same tank is largely just sitting there and doing nothing. As are the stems I put into the other three tanks. They're not dying they're just not doing much. Two stems from the same pot, in the same substrate, in the same tank, with the same water, and lighting and one is thriving and one is just hanging around. Why the difference? God only knows. I'm assuming the rest will eventually take off and start to grow like the one since they haven't died. Perhaps they just need to settle in. The one stem is doing great though. The other seven are just hanging around and looking pretty, but not doing much. Aquarium plants are very quirky for me. Some will thrive. Others that require the same conditions will keel over and die. I spread my plants out and when I find a tank they like, I tend to leave them there. Frogbit and Duckweed love my fifty gallon tank. Dwarf water lettuce and salvinia prefer my thirty high. The water hyacinths prefer my twenty high but survive in all of the tanks. Water sprite loves my ten, twenty, and fifty gallon tanks, but dies in the thirty high. Why? I have no idea. Ludwigia loves my ten gallon. Java fern and anubias nana petite grow anywhere. Java moss grows best in the ten and thirty high and survives elsewhere. The crypts love my thirty high. Dwarf sag seems happiest in the ten. All my tanks use similar lighting for similar intervals, have similar fish, the same source water, the same substrate, yet growth varies wildly from tank to tank. I don't try and force a plant to grow anywhere these days. If it grows in that tank, great! If not, well, I'll move it and see if it wants to grow someplace else. If you just have one planted tank, just assume any plant that dies just doesn't want to live there and move on to something else. If it died there once, odds are replacements of it will die there again. Houseplants and garden plants give me far less trouble. I dig a hole, pop them in and they grow. Aquarium plants are a lot quirkier.

As a general rule, everything eats fish eggs. Your apistos might do a pretty good job of guarding the eggs, but they might eat the eggs themselves. You never know. I was forced to put my January pleco eggs into a net breeder as the new breeder box I'd ordered got delivered to the wrong house. Suffice to say the other plecos made short work of them through the net breeder. Amano shrimp have been observed hunting and eating fry also. It's a fish eat fish world out there. There's always something trying to eat you if you're a fish egg, fry or even an adult fish. There are very few fish that aren't in danger of being eaten by something. (Maybe an adult whale shark is safe, but I wouldn't even guarantee that.) If you're ever reincarnated and look around and notice you have fins, expect to get eaten. Not many fish in the real world ever die of old age.

Lilies prefer to make lily pads over leaves, so you've pretty much got to keep trimming back the pads to get underwater leaves. Mine is still youngish, the recently acquired replacement one anyway, and only has underwater leaves so far. The one I've had since January sixth is still just sitting there like a brown lump and doing nothing however. The new one will likely start putting out lily pads in the not too distant future. I'll likely leave a pad or two on top and trim the rest as they develop to keep some leaves lower. I like them either way though, but the pads do block a lot of light from the other plants.

Yeah. Astronomers knew all about the rings of Saturn until Voyager flew by and got some close up photos that proved nearly all of the "known" stuff wrong. When I hear people saying we all must do something because there's a scientific agreement on it, I cringe. As a general rule, the more scientists agree on something, the more likely it is they're wrong. Things like aquariums have so many variables that it's hard to come to a firm conclusion on just about anything. Even something simple like "How much ammonia is toxic to a fish?" has a lot of "it depends" involved. Water temperature, pH, and more can all affect it and not just a little, but a lot. A low pH tank kept cold can have an insanely high amount of ammonia with no harm to the fish. A higher pH tank at a warmer temp can kill a fish at a tenth of that level. My 50 gallon tank is horrifically overcrowded by any objective measure, but it's doing fine. Why? It's been set up and running for about forty years with the same substrate and many of the same decorations/plants. It's housed an Oscar, a very large Midas Cichlid, some large goldfish, and now a vast school of Neon swordtails and super red bristlenose plecos. All lived long and happy lives in that tank. Is it a magic tank? Probably not. It's likely that the substrate and tank decor have built up such a massive load of bacteria over the years that it can handle anything. I don't disturb it and just leave it be and everyone's happy.

It's pretty interesting stuff. The video quality took me back to my school days, but the information is still pretty solid. I did learn that in the right conditions adult brine shrimp give live birth to baby brine shrimp. I'm kind of intrigued if the egg cases are then reabsorbed by the mother brine shrimp or ejected with the live baby.

If you find yourself bored and have 27+ minutes to kill sometime, San Francisco Bay Brand has an old film titled "The Story of the Brine Shrimp" on YouTube that's somewhat interesting in it shows how brine shrimp and the brine shrimp eggs are collected and processed. The video quality is what those of us who went to school in the 60s and 70s are familiar with and will not be confused with modern video quality. Suffice to say you don't need a 4K HDTV to view the film. It is interesting though if you've ever wondered how brine shrimp and their eggs are collected.

It could be inadequate water pressure. RO systems need a certain amount of water pressure to function. They make booster pumps for them if you don't have adequate pressure.

The electronic water softeners like ScaleBuster only impact the water for up to 48 hours at which point the water returns to its original state. That limits their effectiveness in reducing scale in aquariums as most people keep the water in their aquariums longer than 48 hours.

A pet shop (somewhere in the Midwest I think?) made a YouTube video that I saw a long time ago that had a large discus display tank and used the freshwater Miracle Mud in a sump as a refugium and claimed to have undetectable levels of nitrates without ever doing a water change. This was a very heavily stocked tank also. I can't find that video now, but there are dozens, if not hundreds of YouTube videos on Miracle Mud being used in refugiums. You can spend hours/days watching all of them.

Live brine shrimp used to be a staple food in fish stores when I was younger. (As were live bloodworms, live tubifex worms, and more.) I could keep them alive in the fridge for a week or even longer. The cool temperature in a refrigerator largely causes them to hibernate and they last about a week. San Francisco Bay Brand used to make brine shrimp keeping tanks for stores. The shrimp would be swirling around in the tank and there was a faucet and the store staff would put a container under the faucet and drain out a container of brine shrimp for you and bag them up. (I just did an image search for those tanks and came up blank. It's been a while since I saw one.) It used to be very, very common in many, many local Mom and Pop fish stores. You used to be able to get just about anything you wanted and these days it's not so easy. (At least around here.) The old Martin's Aquarium in Jenkintown, PA, and later in their second location in Cherry Hill, NJ would have small bags of live brine shrimp or bloodworms at the checkouts (along with some leftover livebearers) and you could claim a bag of whichever you wanted with any purchase over a certain amount. They also sold larger bags with many more in it, but you could get small bags free with a purchase.

If there are mosquito larvae in your tanks you should be able to see them pretty easily. They're a good sized larvae. If you can see them you can net them and get rid of them. I feed live mosquito larvae to my fish in the warmer months and my swordtails ensure none ever reach maturity.

It should be fine dried if you need to dry it out.

I kind of doubt that adequate lighting is the issue. At least with the Java moss. In one of my tanks it pretty much grows in the dark. The tank has a large, really large, water sprite that's grown out of the water and shades much of the tank. It gets cut back each week, but you wouldn't know it. There are also water hyacinths covering the top (just waiting for my outdoor pond water to heat up enough to move them back out) along with duckweed, salvinia, and frogbit. Suffice to say, the tank looks like a black hole much of the time and the Java moss is doing fine. It's not growing like a weed, but it's doing fine. Adding a second light won't hurt the plants. It might increase algae growth but it won't hurt the plants any. The Nicrew SkyLED Plus lights are pretty darn bright and cheap. If you were to add one it would likely eliminate a lack of light as an issue for you. With the sword plant doing well though, I don't think light is an issue.

If I was building the "Perfect fish store" and money and space was no issue, I'd have aqua-scaped 55 or 75 gallon tanks in the middle of three tiers of tanks with adults of the fish that were available in the twenty high tanks that were directly above and below them that were for sale. Many people have no idea how big a fish can get, so the display tanks would have the adults in them, fully colored up and showing what the smaller fish for sale would eventually turn into. You wouldn't have to tell a customer how big an adult Oscar could get as one would be right there in front of them. You wouldn't have to tell them how much more colorful a Cherry Barb would be as an adult, fully colored up as one's right there in front of them. They could see the behavior of a school or shoal of fish. They could see what mature plants looked like in an aquarium. How certain rocks or driftwood looked in an aquarium. They could see what fish got along in an aquarium as they were right there before them in a display tank. It would be a pain from a maintenance standpoint, but could show people what the fish will ultimately look like. The fish for sale in the twenty gallon tanks could be in fairly bare tanks to make catching them easier. If you were selling "monster fish" you'd need bigger display tanks for them than even a 75, but it could be doable. A 55 or 75 gallon tank is four feet long. Two twenty highs are four feet long. So, two twenty highs above and two below the 55 or 75 would give you one display tank showing adults and four sale tanks for the younger versions. People could see various aquascapes in real life scenarios and the fish in them. I think that would work from a display and sales standpoint. The cost to set it all up would be scary, but once you've absorbed that cost, and people could see how the fish would eventually look as adults, the extra sales might help offset those setup and maintenance costs. Fish like rainbowfish don't really look all that impressive as young fish. As adults they're often breathtaking. Letting buyers see what a relatively drab young fish will grow into being could really spur sales of those seemingly drab young fish.

If you decide to try a refugium or separate sump to lower nitrates, and you've got money to burn, there's a product out there called Miracle Mud that supposedly is great. (If you believe the marketing.) It's mostly used in marine tanks as reef hobbyists typically are more willing to spend money on stuff that may or may not work, but they also sell a freshwater version. It's been around since 1989 but has never really taken off. (Largely due to the cost and the need to replace 50% of it each year.) The marketing for it makes it sound like the answer to everyone's prayers, but how much of that is marketing and how much is reality? If you're giving it a try, you'll need ten pounds for a 40-65 gallon tank's sump/refugium and it retails at around $70 for ten pounds. (It's expensive mud as mud goes.) Then you need to replace 50% each year. Kudos to the Miracle Mud's maker as they've stuck with the product for decades now, but it's kind of pricey mud and has never really caught on in the hobby. Still, if you want to try and wipe out nitrates i your tank, it's not the most expensive option out there.